Marx and the Climate Crisis #2: Marx and Energy by Sean O’Brien
Lecture 2: Marx and Energy
Hi everyone. Welcome back for the second instalment in this four-part lecture series on ‘Marx and the Climate Crisis’. My name’s Sean O’Brien, and since the first lecture was recorded, I’ve taken up a Lectureship in 20th and 21st Century American Literature at the University of Bristol. Many thanks once again to the87press and the editing team for all their hard work, and to everyone for watching. In the previous lecture, we returned to some key passages from Marx’s Capital to recover his critical theory of nature, or perhaps more properly ‘society-nature relations’, since, as we saw, modernity for Marx is distinguished by the social mediation of first nature by a fetishized ‘second nature’. The concept of second nature—which comes to Marx from Hegel’s writings on habit and has its roots in Aristotelian thought—allows Marx to distinguish between the ‘natural form’ and the ‘value form’ of a commodity, a distinction that would be crucial to the development of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and, later, to what has come to be known in the Anglophone world as Value-Form Theory.
The first lecture discussed the distinction Marx makes in Vol. I of Capital between the labour process in general, and the labour process under capital, or what he calls the valorisation process. Here, we noted Marx’s claim that capital introduces a rift into the metabolic relationship between nature and society, a disturbance that results not from the conscious actions of subjects, but instead stems from the blind operations of structural forces at work in the valorisation process. We then turned to the chapter on machinery and large-scale industry, where Marx levels a critique of modern agriculture, highlighting the issue of soil exhaustion stemming from the second agricultural revolution, which was of widespread concern for capitalist society in the period. Marx writes:
Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. (637)
This passage and the next, which engages the work of German chemist Justus von Leibig, offer insights into the ecological dimensions of Marx’s thought, and especially his critical theory of nature, that have been central to the development of various strands of ecological Marxism.
…all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker. (638)
Following Marx’s writings on the metabolic relationship between human society and the natural world, we turned to the philosophical critique of the capitalist domination of nature developed by Frankfurt School critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and especially Alfred Schmidt, a student of Adorno’s and a key figure in the development of ecological Marxism.
Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx offers a crucial starting point for understanding the modern metabolism of society and nature. Schmidt was at pains to demonstrate that, because the act of exchange abstracts from the useful, concrete, material properties of the commodity, value “is indifferent towards the stuff of nature” (74). When analyzing the dual nature of the commodity as both use-value and exchange-value, Marx was concerned primarily with its exchange-value, which expresses its value as a determinant amount of socially necessary labour time and therefore, as Schmidt insists, has nothing whatsoever to do with nature. Schmidt’s analysis therefore begins with what Marx calls capital’s ‘cell form’, the commodity, and with a focus not on its use-value but on the form of value Marx calls exchange-value, or ‘the commodity as embodiment of abstract human labour’, something ‘independent of any determination by nature’ (15). Schmidt writes:
As a determinant of exchange-value, labour is abstract, general and undifferentiated; as a determinant of use-value it is concrete, particular and composed of many distinct modes of labour. The exchange value of a commodity has no natural content whatsoever. It is indifferent to its natural qualities because it is the embodiment of human labour in general measured by the time outlaid, and all the determinations of nature are extinguished in it. (65-66)
As values, Schmidt argues, commodities “no longer incorporate the living interaction between men and nature, but emerge as a dead and thing-like reality, as an objective necessity by which human life is ruled, as by a blind fate” (68). However, because of the fetish character of the commodity, Schmidt argues, “the natural determination of the commodity appears as social, its social determination appears as an inherent natural determination” (68). In this way, he continues, “the use-value, which is a product of the direct exchange between man and nature, takes on an existence ... cut loose from any connection with its natural existence” (93).
The opening lecture turned to the work of these critical theorists to explain how what Adorno and Horkheimer call ‘the dialectic of Enlightenment’ constitutes first nature as an external object subject to ceaseless appropriation, exploitation, and depletion, a critique these figures would eventually extend to Marx himself as an Enlightenment figure and to the actually existing socialist states of the twentieth century. We then considered subsequent efforts to reclaim Marx for a Marxian ecology, weighing eco-socialist theories of ‘metabolic rift’ against value-theoretical approaches to societal nature relations to develop a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation.
The lecture closed with a brief reference to recent work by Alexander Stoner and Søren Mau, both of whom argue explicitly against any notion of an original identity between humans and nature that might be recovered in the communist project. Stoner suggests that such a conceptualization, which is used to characterize pre-bourgeois forms of social life as well as the vision of socialism advanced by figures associated with the metabolic rift analysis, can only emerge in bourgeois society when this relationship is inverted, as labour is separated from its natural conditions. Drawing on the work of Moishe Postone, Stoner argues that ‘The fact that the original identity of humanity and nature can be and has been projected backward onto all of human history is itself reflective of capital’s specific historical logic – namely, its abstract generality’ (96). In other words, Stoner suggests that ‘first nature’ and ‘second nature’ cannot be transposed onto noncapitalist and capitalist forms of social organisation. The former, rather, is intelligible only in relation to the latter.
In another critical contribution to the conversation on society-nature relations, Soren Mau argues in Mute Compulsion that ‘the corporeal organization of the human being’ includes ‘extra-somatic tools’, which he describes, following Marx, as ‘bodily organs’ (2023: 97). That is, Mau posits an ‘original cleavage between humans and the rest of nature’ (102), a fissure into which capital inserts itself as mediator in what he calls ‘metabolic domination’ (104). For Mau, then, no ‘holy bond’ between human society and the natural world ‘has been broken’ (102) with the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. The metabolic relation between nature and society is better understood as one that might be mediated by human beings in any number of ways. As he puts it, ‘nature is the totality out of which emerges an animal whose corporeal organisation opens up a new field of possibility which sets these animals apart from the rest of nature’ (106).
In this second lecture, I want to continue this line of inquiry into societal-nature relations as it pertains to the problem of energy. Fossil fuels have been the dominant source of energy powering economic expansion since the industrial revolution. This fossil-fuelled economic development has been responsible for the lion’s share of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, as we now know for certain, leading to global warming, rising sea levels, ocean acidification and extreme weather events. And yet, how much do we generally know about energy? No doubt you learned in school about Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb, or the modern discover of electricity by Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps you paid a certain amount of attention to the history of coal mining and its place in the rise and fall of the workers’ movement. It’s likely that oil has come up in discussions you’ve had about either the first Gulf War, or the second, or both. And the burning of fossil fuels is, of course, a topic of central concern in the era of climate change. But what about energy?
This lecture draws on work in the Energy Humanities, a cross-disciplinary field of scholarship that highlights the essential contribution that the insights and methods of the humanities bring to bear on the study of our carbon-fuelled modernity and the vital question of transition to cleaner, more sustainable forms of energy. We’ll take a detailed look at three concepts developed by scholars working in the field of Energy Humanities: energy deepening, energy transition, and energy impasse. We will then turn to work on the political economy of energy and its environmental consequences, including the After Oil collective on ‘petroculture’, Andreas Malm on ‘fossil capital’, and Timothy Mitchell on ‘carbon democracy’, which will allow us to develop a theoretical vocabulary for the age of carbon modernity. While these thinkers have different relations to Marx and Marxism, their work should be of interest to any Marxist concerned with the role energy plays in the climate crisis.
As Jeff Diamanti and Brent Ryan Bellamy insist, energy lies at the heart of the relation between capital and climate. In the introduction to Materialism and the Critique of Energy, they open with the claim that ‘the environmental problem of energy is and always has been deeply bound to the material origins of the commodity form — what it takes to make a thing and what it takes to move it’ (ix). At stake in the Marxist critique of energy is an attention to the way energy and its use have been shaped by the valorisation of value. Energy, in the modern era, has been not only been ‘brought to market’ (xxv) like any other commodity, but has made possible the expanded reproduction of capital through its integration into the production and circulation of commodities. In Diamanti and Bellamy’s words, ‘The central insight that historical materialism brings to a theorization of energy is that the relation we have to fossil fuels, and indeed to all forms of generating, capturing, and storing or distributing energy, is form determined by value’ (xxiv). Not only the lightbulb, then, but also the grid.
Oil in this analysis is not simply one commodity among others, and not only because it can be found in many commodities in its biproduct form as plastic polymer. Oil, as Imre Szeman argues, is better understood as something of an ‘ur-commodity: the substance on which the globe depends to heat its homes, to move bodies and goods around, to build and maintain infrastructure’. Oil, he writes, is nothing less than ‘the substance that, for better and for worse, makes the world go round’ (3). This emphasis on the constitutive role of energy in the reproduction of commodity producing society complicates what might otherwise be a fairly simple account of what Diamanti and Bellamy call ‘the environment problem of energy’ (ix). That story would go something like this: first coal and then oil allowed for the development of the industrial plant, machinery, and shipping systems of modern capitalism, and, as a result, CO2 emissions filled the atmosphere, leading to global warming.
This story is true, of course, but it only begins to scratch the surface of what is in fact a much more systemic relationship between energy and capital. While energy and its use are, as Diamanti and Bellamy note, form determined by value, energy in their account is also form-giving, operating as a material substratum upon which is erected the entire edifice of capitalism in what Marx describes as its ‘fully developed’ form (899). In its encounter with human labour power, it has made possible what Robert Brenner calls the ‘relentless and systematic development of the productive forces’ (13). But the critique goes further than this. If value is, as Schmidt notes, ‘indifferent towards the stuff of nature’ (74), that indifference must also apply to the material stuff we turn into energy, whether we’re talking about coal or oil, or indeed about wind or solar radiation. It’s not only particular fuel sources that interest us, then, but also the role that energy plays in the reproduction of capital.
As Diamanti and Bellamy insist, we need to develop a ‘dialectical sense of energy as social relation’ (xxv). And this insight means that, as Diamanti and Bellamy write, ‘while the condition of climate change today has occasioned a groundswell of interest in energy regimes and environmental systems, only the materialist critique of energy found at the heart of Marxism can explain why capitalism is an energy system and hence offer a clearer sense of a way out of its fossil-fueled inertia’ (x). What, though, of this broader groundswell of interest in energy regimes that Diamanti and Bellamy gesture towards? What might such methodologically diverse developments in scholarship offer a Marxist critique of energy? And how might we understand these wider academic developments as themselves constitutive of a field of scholarship that has emerged in response to the climate crisis?
It is here that the still young field of the Energy Humanities intervenes to argue that ‘energy is absolutely necessary for modern societies. To be modern’, as Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer write in their introduction to Energy Humanities: An Anthology, ‘is to depend on the capacities and abilities generated by energy’ (1). And yet, despite the centrality of energy to the history of the form of society we call modernity, energy has largely been overlooked or downplayed in the literature. As Szeman notes elsewhere:
For too long, energy has been treated as a largely neutral input into societies—a necessary element of social life but not one that has any significant, defining impact on its shape, form, and character. The history of modernity, for instance, has been figured in relation to novel developments in literary culture, scientific discovery, the birth of cities, the expansion of individual political freedoms, the structures and strictures of colonialism, and the creation of the global nation-state system. It has seldom been narrated in relation to the massive expansion of socially available energy (and the energy of a specific form: fossil fuels, which are easy to transport and store) and the concurrent redefinition of social practices, behaviors, and beliefs occasioned by this historically unprecedented explosion of access to energy. (2021: 204)
This absence might be explainable at least in part because unlike, say, a barrel of oil, energy itself is largely invisible, except for the fact that, even in its concrete forms as specific fuel sources such as coal and oil, energy is largely hidden from the quotidian experience of modern life. As Jennifer Wenzel writes, ‘Oil is everywhere, ubiquitous in our daily life, and yet we so rarely see oil, either literally or metaphorically’ (np). As someone who works in literary and cultural studies, I’m interested in the conceptual and methodological questions that Wenzel suggests this insight raises:
Given this simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility, our central questions are, how do we read for oil? and how do different kinds of texts—novels, short stories, poems, manifestos, essays, cartoons, photographs, and documentary films—either work against or contribute to oil’s invisibility? Such questions of representation and interpretation are fundamental to literary study, but we also ask rather different questions about the material aspects of literary production and consumption, about how oil not only fuels the imagination in a metaphorical sense but is also necessary for making and distributing books and films, Kindles and iPads. Our consideration of the relationships between literature and oil, in other words, ranges far beyond a thematic study of literature that is “about” oil. (np)
And it’s not just literary criticism that has largely ignored the matter of oil’s textual mediations, either. As Amitav Ghosh asked back in 1992: given oil’s ubiquity, why has the oil encounter has not produced the same literary response as the colonial spice encounter did? Why there are many novels about the spice trade, and so few about oil? There are, of course, important exceptions, notably Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!, a story based loosely on the life of American oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny and his company, Pan American Petroleum & Transport, one of the largest oil companies of its time.
But to take Wenzel’s provocations seriously, how should we read for oil? Patricia Yaegar suggests we might read literature for what she calls an ‘energy unconscious’ (306):
Instead of divvying up literary works into hundred-year intervals (or elastic variants like the long eighteenth or twentieth century) or categories harnessing the history of ideas (Romanticism, Enlightenment), what happens if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them possible? This would mean aligning Roth’s immigrant meditations on power with Henry Adams’s blue-blood musings on ‘the dynamo and the virgin’, or comparing David’s coal obsessions with those of Paul, the coal miner’s son in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. We might juxtapose Charles Dickens’s tallow-burning characters with Shakespeare’s, or connect the dots between the fuels used for cooking and warmth in The Odyssey and in Gabriel García Márquez’s [One Hundred Years of Solitude]. (305-06)
Yaeger’s interest in literature’s relationship to energy began, she notes, when, in the midst of American ‘energy extravagance’, she ‘picked up Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and wondered, how often do Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise stop for gas? As they criss-cross the country’, she thought, ‘do they worry about how much fuel they’re using or the price of oil? Or is this a question for the twenty-first century, for a nation that survived the Arab oil embargo and the BP oil spill and may not survive global warming?’ (306). What Yaeger finds in Kerouac’s most famous novel is that, while Dean and Sal do in fact stop for gas, these ‘characters rarely experience the material world as an impediment’, even as the novel is ‘fascinated with clean raw materials and their transformation into dirty culture’ (306). ‘Energy anxiety’, she suggests, ‘keeps popping up’ (306).
Might this also be true for histories of capitalism, which have, like those of modernity and its literary cultures, largely overlooked the centrality of energy? Szeman offers one possible answer to this question. Rather than using a geographic-territorial hegemon to periodize the longue durée of capital as Giovanni Arrighi does in his influential work on systemic cycles of accumulation, Szeman asks: what if the core of capital developments were taken to be their dominant forms of energy? If this were the case, the long-nineteenth and long-twentieth centuries could be periodized anew:
steam capitalism in 1765 creates the conditions for the first great subsumption of agricultural labor into urban factories (a process of proletarianization that is only now coming to a completion), followed by the advent of oil capitalism in 1859 (with its discovery in Titusville, Pennsylvania), which enabled powerful and forceful new modalities of capitalist reproduction and expansion. (806)
Reading energy into the history of capitalism is therefore not simply about accounting for the fact that burning dirty energy in the factories spews catastrophic amounts of CO2 into the air, or that oil has been at the heart of geo-political conflict for decades. It’s also not only about reckoning with the ways in which industrial capitalism has been disastrous for the environment more generally or insisting that we need to impose stricter regulations on emissions, to switch to renewables, energy efficient homes, electric cars, and generally to adopt greener technologies and consumer habits.
Centring energy in the history of capitalism is rather to recast modernity as ‘petromodernity’, a term Stephanie LeMenager uses to describe ‘a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum’ (60), and thus to understand modern subjects as ‘petrosubjects’ who, as Diamanti and Szeman argue, ‘inhabit a petroculture of quickened time and expanded space that requires oil to make it flow’ (143). What does this term ‘petroculture’ mean? The Petrocultures Research Group write:
We use this term to emphasize the ways in which post-industrial society today is an oil society through and through. It is shaped by oil in physical and material ways, from the automobiles and highways we use to the plastics that permeate our food supply and built environments. Even more significantly, fossil fuels have also shaped our values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings. These latter can be difficult to parse. It might be easy to point to a highway interchange and understand its relationship to our oil culture, but it is much harder to name and isolate the ideals of autonomy and mobility, for instance, that are just as strongly linked to the historical conditions of a fossil fuel society. In a very real way, these values are fuelled by fossil fuels, as are so many of the other values and aspirations that we have come to associate with the freedoms and capacities of modern life. It is in this sense that we are a petroculture; and it is for this reason, too, that transitioning from fossil fuels to other sources of energy will require more than new energy technologies. We will need to transform and transition our cultural and social values at the same time. (9-10)
The concept of ‘petroculture’ is central to the scholarship of the Energy Humanities, which responds precisely to this challenge as it is outlined by the Petrocultures Research Group.
It might therefore be useful at this point in the lecture to take a momentary step back and ask, what exactly are the Energy Humanities, and how does work in the field respond to the conceptual and methodological challenges posed by the problem of energy and its relation to carbon-fuelled climate change? Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer offer a useful gloss on the field:
As an increasing number of researchers have insisted, the challenge of addressing global warming isn’t fundamentally a scientific or technological one. Environmental scientists have played a crucial role in identifying the causes and consequences of global warming, including projections of what might occur if we fail to keep increases in global temperature to less than 2.0°C, as it appears we are poised to do. However, the next steps in addressing environmental crisis will have to come from the humanities and social sciences – from those disciplines that have long attended to the intricacies of social processes, the nature and capacity of political change, and the circulation and organisation of symbolic meaning through culture. This constitutes an enormous challenge and is one that we have barely begun to take up.
In other words, if the environmental problem of energy is baked into capitalist society, technological innovations and policy shifts will never be enough. They continue:
What we need to do is, first, grasp the full intricacies of our imbrication with energy systems (and with fossil fuels in particular), and second, map out other ways of being, having, and belonging in relation to both old and new forms of energy. The task is nothing less than to reimagine modernity, and in the process to figure ourselves as different kinds of beings than the ones who have built a civilisation on the promises, intensities, and fantasies of a particularly dirty, destructive form of energy. (3)
Key to the development of this analysis are three terms that inform the study of energy and the inquiry into the possibility of a world after oil. The first is energy deepening, a term adapted from the concept of capital deepening, which refers in an increase in the capital-labour ratio—a process described in Marxian terms as a rising technical composition of capital—so that the output per unit of labour-time is amplified by investing in productivity enhancing technological innovations. In other words, capital deepening refers to an increase in the proportion of the capital stock to the number of labour hours worked. Capital deepening is therefore often associated with rising unemployment—sometimes called ‘structural’ or ‘technological’ unemployment—as capital accumulation proceeds with more hardware and software relative to the number of workers on the job. In Marxian terms, capital deepening describes the production of a relative surplus population.
As a concept, energy deepening shares with its referent an emphasis on rising productivity and labour shedding, understood as consequences of competitive pressures on individual capitals to cut labour costs and maximize efficiency, but recontextualizes these historical developments in the structure and process of capital accumulation through an attention to the role that fossil-fuels play in fuelling industrialized production. As the Petrocultures Research Group argue:
Energizing the labour process at the site of production increased the productive capacity of workers, but it also gave business owners a solution to the rising cost of labour. Today, we call these phenomena automation, offshoring, and capital deepening, yet as economic strategies all three depend on more and more non-human energy in the form of transportation and more efficient machinery. These phenomena make visible the relation between reducing labour costs and increasing dependency on energy outputs in a formulation known as ‘energy deepening’. Read from the standpoint of oil’s industrial beginnings, rising unemployment and economic disparity are logically consistent with a specifically fossil-fuelled form of capital. (17-18)
As capital aims to increase profitability through manufacture, gathering increasing numbers of workers on the factory floor, or offshoring production in search of cheaper labour, it also seeks ‘to pair workers with more and more energy-hungry machines fuelled on coal and then electricity’, and ‘to replace workers with technologies able to do the same job’ (24). Key for the critique of energy is that ‘All four strategies…depend on a steady rise in energy inputs further and further removed from the spaces of labour’ (24). This rise in energy inputs is what has become known as energy deepening.
Energy deepening therefore ‘names the tendency through which capitalist modernization mobilizes natural forms of physical power to optimize, manage, and discard human labour’ (24), and can be understood to from result from one instance of what energy humanists call ‘energy transition’, which is the second term I want to introduce here as foundational to the study and critique of energy as it has developed over the past decade or two. Energy transition names both the historical movement from one dominant energy source to the next, as well as the aspirational horizon of a post-carbon future. We’ll return to the contemporary question of energy transition away from fossil fuels, which is in fact already underway in many respects, although just how ‘green’ it is in practice is a questionable to say the least. But I want to look first at the historical transition to fossil fuels, since, as energy humanists insist, it is the only example of energy transition that might provide insights into the scope and scale of decarbonization.
Consider this oil-on-canvas painting by the English Romantic artist J.M.W. Turner from 1839, titled ‘The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838’. The painting, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839, depicts the 98-gun HMS Temeraire, a naval warship which had played a role in the Battle of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames by a paddle-wheel steam tug towards its final berth in Rotherhithe to be broken up for scrap. Turner interests me because his work regularly addresses the emergence of industrial technology, including energy transition, as steam replaced sail power and fossil-fuelled machines replaced or augmented labour power. At a glance, this painting appears to capture a ‘calm marine landscape’, but, as Joan Sullivan notes, ‘behind this placid scene, a dramatic historical event is unfolding as a metaphor of the global shift from wind to coal, an energy transition that ultimately would transform the world. Here, the aging hulk of the once mighty Temeraire, a veteran 98-gun warship (pale, ghostly, weak: stripped of its sails) is being pulled by a small steam-powered tugboat (modern, strong, polluting) on her last voyage—at sunset no less—as the age of sail gives way to the age of steam’.
It is no exaggeration to say, as Sullivan does, that the historical transition to fossil fuels has transformed the world, fuelling modernization. It has produced the form of capital that Marx and Engels understood would spread across the world, its productive capacities rising to unprecedented heights with each wave of accumulation and energy deepening. This is why the transition to fossil fuels provides the only example of energy transition that matches the scale and scope of transition now needed to move away from fossil fuels and towards cleaner, renewable forms of energy. But it is equally a way of understanding why energy transition in the present remains such a fraught and difficult process. This blockage is what energy humanists call ‘energy impasse’. If ‘fossil fuels have made possible the greatest era of social, technological, and economic growth this earth has ever seen’, as the Petrocultures Research Group argues, it is also true that oil, ‘due to its growth-giving capacity—has generated its own logical, physical, and social impasse’ (14). This contradiction grounds the dual meaning of the idea of a world after oil since we already live in such a world. Ours is a world shaped by oil and we live with its consequences, which is why we now need to leave fossil fuels behind, and so the after in ‘after oil’ also refers to this aspirational horizon. But because oil has become so firmly embedded in our social, political, and economic systems, efforts to decarbonize find themselves blocked at every turn. This is energy impasse.
How did we get here? In the final section of this lecture, I want to turn to the work of Andreas Malm on ‘fossil capital’ and Timothy Mitchell on ‘carbon democracy’. Malm’s focus is the advent of the coal-fuelled fossil economy in the nineteenth century. Mitchell begins his study with an attention to the political role coal played in the nineteenth century, then follows the entanglements of energy flow and politics as oil comes to define the development of democracy in the twentieth century. As we are approaching the end of the lecture, I regrettably do not have the time to give these magisterial works their due and can only sketch some of their key claims briefly here. According to Malm, fossil capital names ‘an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide’ (11). He begins his book by noting that ‘ours is, if anything, an epoch of diachronicity’ (8). This idea of diachronicity recurs across his work, resonating most immediately in his account of the temporal belatedness of the fossil economy and its environmental consequences. This diachronicity, Malm contends, is at the root of contemporary climate change, a situation he describes as ‘a messy mix-up of time scales’ that involves a ‘falling in of history on the present’ (9).
While there is some evidence to suggest that concerns about the ecological costs of steam power began to emerge concurrently with the industrial revolution, these were few and far between and amounted to little in the way of sustained scientific inquiry. Rather, Malm argues:
Global warming is the unintended by-product par excellence. A cotton manufacturer of early nineteenth-century Lancashire who decided to forgo his old waterwheel and invest in a steam engine, erect a chimney and order coal from a nearby pit did not, in all likelihood, entertain the possibility that this act could have any kind of relationship to the extent of Arctic sea ice, the salinity of Nile Delta soil, the altitude of the Maldives, the frequency of droughts on the Horn of Africa, the diversity of amphibian species in Central American rain forests, the availability of water in Asian rivers or, for that matter, the risk of flooding along the Thames and the English coastline. (1-2)
For this reason, it is often difficult to trace a direct connection between the combustion of carbon-based energy sources and the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events, even if climate scientists insist that these climate events are the direct result of cumulative increases in the mass of atmospheric CO2 over the past two centuries. The destructive violence of climate change is therefore resonant with Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’, by which he means to refer to ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (2).
I don’t want to go too deeply into Nixon’s work on slow violence and what he calls the ‘environmentalism of the poor’, since we don’t have a lot of time, and so we’ll return to his work in the final lecture of this series, but it’s worth looking briefly at the concept here, since it helps clarify the ‘diachronicity’ of climate change that Malm describes. As Nixon writes:
Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. (2-3)
Slow violence, then, is violence which occurs gradually and is often invisible. It is ‘incremental and accretive’, contrasted with other forms of violence that are dramatic and evental. The most pressing aspect of slow violence, Nixon argues, is its belated temporality. This is Malm’s point about carbon emissions released two centuries ago—largely unbeknownst to anybody at the time—building up in the atmosphere for decades, now crashing like waves on the shores of the present.
Because slow violence lacks the spectacle and punctuality of typical violence, it tends to be ignored by the media. This lack of attention is compounded by what Nixon describes as ‘our flickering attention spans’, which dart from one story to the next and lack the patience to dwell on the ‘slow paced and open ended’ narratives of slow violence (6). The predominant result of slow violence is, according to Nixon, displacement. Crucially, however, such displacement does not only mean the expulsion of populations from the land and forced migration. Nixon coins the term ‘displacement in place’ to describe the way in which resource extraction strips the land of its habitability. Nixon introduces the idea of ‘temporalities of place’ to describe the ways in which landscapes might be sped up for development and argues that slow violence often entails the forceful imposition of a corporate or ‘official landscape’ onto a local or ‘vernacular one’ (17) at the expense of biodiversity and habitability.
This speeding up of global development and resource extraction is captured for Nixon in the Great Acceleration, a moment in the immediate postwar period in which every environmental and socioeconomic indicator skyrocketed, from population growth, water use, and international tourism to carbon dioxide emissions, ocean acidification, and surface temperature. For many social scientists, the Great Acceleration signals the solidification of a new historical epoch, the Anthropocene, in which the unprecedented biophysical influence of the human species on the natural environmental since the industrial revolution equals something like a ‘major geological event’ (12). This concept, which we’ll consider in more detail in the next lecture of the series, makes slow violence not only a problem of temporality but also one of scale, since it becomes increasingly hard to grasp the full extent of the ecological crisis at hand, and because its vastness calls the possibility of political intervention—and even human agency as such—radically into question.
But let’s return to Malm. He opens the main body of his research-rich study into the historical emergence of what he calls ‘fossil capital’ with a provocation: why did steam power, which was far more expensive, replace wind power? Steam ‘gained supremacy’, Malm insists, ‘in spite of water being abundant, cheaper and at least as powerful, even and efficient’ (93). Malm argues against the account found in any number of Malthusian-inflected historical analyses that water scarcity was main reason for steam’s ultimate success. As Malm insists, drawing in part on statements from mill owners made during the Factory Inquiry of 1833, ‘no water scarcity loomed on the horizon, no general shortages appear – not even in central cotton districts. Rather, the shift from steam happened in spite of an overall abundance of unexploited watersheds’ (83). Why, then, if water was cheaper and more abundant, did capital adopt a scarcer, more expensive source of energy? Malm identifies three kinds of energy. Flow energy sources such as wind and water are uncaptured by photosynthesis and their accessibility is conditioned by landscape and weather. Animate power refers to sources of energy embodied in living creatures—human labour but also animal power—and conditioned by the metabolic requirements for reproduction. Stock energy—coal, for instance, or oil—is made of the remnants of solar radiation in the distant past and, once extracted, can be freely transported and stored, although its utilisation requires human labour. His account of the industrial revolution tells a story in which flow energy and animate power were replaced by stock energy.
The reasons for this energy transition are decidedly political. The transition to the fossil-based economy, Malm argues, was driven primarily by bourgeois property relations and the need to secure an energy source that would allow individual producers a certain level of autonomy. Coal was the answer capital needed. Its capacity to be broken up and transported to the production site made it more appealing than water, which required production follow its flows, its reservoir configurations lending themselves to a system to collective ownership; as well as labour power, which was limited by the Factory Act of 1833’s restrictions on legal overtime and, perhaps most importantly, was more easily controlled and more cheaply reproduced in the factory system than in the riverside colonies. A pivotal historical irony is that capital would find itself increasingly vulnerable to what Timothy Mitchell describes as ‘stoppages or sabotage’ (144) directed at the rail lines that connected coal mines to the factories. In Mitchell’s account, the rise of coal not only allowed for the development of large-scale manufacture, but also enabled workers to gather together, forming unions and political clubs where a distinctly workerist political consciousness was forged, and thus to agitate for political rights. Crucially, for Mitchell, their capacity to advance their political goals was rooted in large part in the vulnerability of what he calls the ‘carbon energy networks of the coal age’ (144).
Once coal was incorporated into the production process, he writes, a ‘relatively minor malfunction, mistiming or interruption, introduced at the right place and moment, could now have widespread effects’ (22-3). Mitchell cites the leader of the French railwaymen’s union, who in 1895 stated that, ‘With two pennies-worth of a certain substance, used in the right way, we can make a locomotive unable to work’ (23). Workers continued to develop and deploy these strategies of sabotage, and
By the turn of the twentieth century, the vulnerability of these mechanisms and the concentrated flows of energy on which they depended had given workers a greatly increased political power. Large coal strikes could trigger wider mobilisations, as happened with the violent strike that followed the 1906 Courrières colliery disaster in north-eastern France, which helped provoke a general strike that paralysed Paris. The most common pattern, however, was for strikes to spread through the interconnected industries of coal mining, railways, docking and shipping. In Britain, the miners, railwaymen and transport workers organised three great national strikes in 1911–12, formalising their relationship in the Triple Alliance created on the eve of the First World War. The coordination of strikes, slow-downs and other forms of sabotage enabled the construction, at certain moments, of a new political instrument: the general strike. (23)
Coal bestowed upon the working-class an unprecedented degree of political power, and thus, Mitchell argues, became a driving force of democratisation. This, capital could not abide. Such vulnerability encouraged the search for a new source of energy that could fuel industrial production but would be less vulnerable to the tactics of the workers’ movement. This time, capital found its answer in oil, which not only allowed for increased control over workers, but also enabled oil companies to develop complex systems for restricting supply in order to maximize profits.
With the rise of coal power, then, workers developed a capacity to disrupt capital’s energy systems, a tactic they used to advance the first mass democratic politics in the West. Oil offered Western industry an alternative, and with the shift to oil came a new form of politics organized around a capitalist economy that appeared capable of infinite growth. What followed, Mitchell argues, was a Western ‘democracy’ structurally dependent for its energy on an ‘undemocratic’ Middle East. We now live with the consequences of these historical developments in energy and politics. And our political systems appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy: the increasing scarcity of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the climate. Once again, we find ourselves at an ‘energy impasse’. And yet, impasse does not necessarily mean blockage, but might instead be thought of as a moment of possibility, a stoppage in the reproduction of the status quo that could, perhaps, allow for the emergence of a post-carbon society. And so, by way of conclusion, I turn to a provocation from the Petrocultures Research Group, who ask:
what if we were to think impasse otherwise? Rather than understanding impasse as foreclosure of possibility, we posit that impasse is a situation of radical indeterminacy where existing assumptions and material relations can no longer hold or sustain us and in which we might activate the potential obscured by business-as-usual. In this case, an impasse is not a blockage; it is a condition of possibility for action within a situation that is suddenly open because it is uncertain. Impasse is, in other words, a moment for aspiration and courage. This moment is the transition to a society after oil. (16)
Thanks.
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